The Other Girls, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

hair hanging down her shoulders. Tipps flew and grabbed the baby, and then she turned and clawed him like a tiger-cat. But he's a strong man, and cool; he held the child back with one hand, and with the other he got hold of one of her wrists and gave it a grip,--just twist enough to make the other hand come after his; and then he caught them both. She spit and kicked; it was all she could do; she was just a mad thing. She lost her balance, of course, and went down; he put his foot on her chest, just enough to show her he could master her; and then she went from howling to crying. 'Finish me, and I wouldn't care!' she said; and then lay still, all in a heap, moaning. 'I won't hurt ye,' says Tipps. 'I never hurt a woman yet, soul nor body. What was ye goin' to do with this 'ere little baby?' 'I was goin' to send it out of the hell it's born into,' she said, with an awful hate in the sound of her voice. 'Goin' to _kill_ it! You wouldn't ha' done that?' 'Yes, I would. I'd 'a done it, if I was hanged for it the next minute. Isn't it my business that ever it was here?'

"'Now look here!' says Tipps. 'You're calmed down a little. If you'll stay calm, and come with me, I'll take you to a safe place. If you don't, I'll call a policeman, and you'll go to the lock-up. Which'll ye have?' 'You've got me,' she said, in a kind of a sulk. 'I s'pose you'll do what you like with me. That's the way of it. Anybody can be as bad and as miserable as they please, but they won't be let out of it. It's hell, I tell you,--this very world. And folks don't know they've got there.'

"Tipps says there's hopes of her from just that word bad. She wouldn't have put that in, otherways. Well, he brought her here, and the baby. And they're both up-stairs. She's as weak as water, now the drink is out of her. But it wasn't all drink. The desperation is in her eyes, though it's give way, and helpless. And what to do with 'em next, I _don't_ know."

"I do," said Desire, with her eyes full. "She must be comforted up. And then, Mr. Vireo must know, the first thing. Afterwards, he will see."

Luclarion took Desire up-stairs.

The girl was lying, in a clean night-dress, in a clean, white bed. Her hair, dark and beautiful, was combed and braided away from her face, and lay back, in two long, heavy plaits, across the pillow. Her features were sharp, but delicate, and were meant to have been pretty. But her eyes! Out of them a suffering demon seemed to look, with a still, hopeless rage.

Desire came up to the bedside.

"What do you want?" the girl said, slowly, with a deep, hard, resentful scorn in her voice. "Have you come to see what it is all like? Do you want to feel how clean you are beside me? That's a part of it; the way they torment."

It was like the cry of the devil out of the man against the Son of God.

"No," said Desire, just as slowly, in her turn. "I can only feel the cleanness in you that is making you suffer against the sin. The badness doesn't belong to you. Let it go, and begin again."

It was the word of the Lord,--"Hold thy peace, and come out of him." Desire Ledwith spoke as she was that minute moved of the Spirit. The touch of power went down through all the misery and badness, to the woman's soul, that knew itself to be just clean enough for agony. She turned her eyes, with the fiery gloom in them, away, pressing her forehead down against the pillow.

"God sees it better than I do," said Desire, gently.

An arm flung itself out from under the bedclothes, thrusting them off. The head rolled itself over, with the face away.

"God! Pf!"

So far from Him; and yet so close, in the awful hold of his unrelaxing love!

Desire kept silence; she could not force upon her the thought, the Name: the Name for whose hallowing to pray, is to pray for the holiness in ourselves that alone can make it tender.

"What do you know about God?" the voice asked defiantly, the face still turned away.

"I know that his Living Spirit touches your thought and mine, this moment, and moves them to each other. As you and I are alive, He is alive beside us and between us. Your pain is his pain for you. You feel it just where you are joined to Him; in the quick of your soul. If it were not for that, you would be dead; you could not feel at all."

Was this the Desire Ledwith of the old time, with deep thoughts but half understood, and shrinking always from any recognizing word? She shrunk now, just as much, from any needless expression of herself; from any parade or talking over of sacred perception and experience; but the real life was all the stronger in her; all the surer to use her when its hour came. She had escaped out of all shams and contradictions. Unconsent to the divine impulse comes of incongruity. There was no incongruity now, to shame or to deter; no separate or double consciousness to stand apart in her soul, rebuked or repugnant. She gave herself quietly, simply, freely, to God's thought for this other child of his; the Thought that she knew was touching and stirring her own.

"I shall send somebody to you who can tell you more than I can, Mary," she said, presently. "You will find there is heart and help in the world that can only be God's own. Believe in that, and you will come to believe in Him. You have seen only the wrong, bad side, I am afraid. The _under_ side; the side turned down toward"--

"Hell-fire," said Mary Moxall, filling Desire's hesitation with an utterance of hard, unrecking distinctness.

But Desire Ledwith knew that the hard unreckingness was only the reflex of a tenderness quick, not dead, which the Lord would not let go of to perish.

Sylvie and Hazel came in below, and she left Mary Moxall and went down to them. The three took leave, for it was after five o'clock.

When they got out from the street-car at Borden Square, Desire left them, to go round by Savin Street, and see Mr. Vireo. Hazel went home; Mrs. Ripwinkley expected her to-night; Miss Craydocke and some of the Beehive people were to come to tea. Sylvie hastened on to Greenley Street, anxious to return to her mother. She had rarely left her, lately, so long as this.

How would it be when they had heard from Mr. Thayne what she felt sure they must hear,--when they had to leave Greenley Street and go into that cheap little lodging-room, and she had to stay away from her mother all day long?

She remembered the time when she had thought it would be nice to have a "few things;" nice to earn her own living; to be one of the "Other Girls."


CHAPTER XXXI.

CHOSEN: AND CALLED.

Desire Ledwith found nobody at home at Mr. Vireo's. The maid-servant said that she could not tell when they would return. Mrs. Vireo was at her mother's, and she believed they would not come back to tea.

Desire knew that it was one of the minister's chapel nights. She went away, up Savin Street, disappointed; wishing that she could have sent instant help to Mary Moxall, who, she thought, could not withstand the evangel of Hilary Vireo's presence. It is so sure that nothing so instantly brings the heavenly power to bear upon a soul as contact with a humanity in which it already abides and rules. She wanted this girl to touch the hem of a garment of earthly living, with which it had clothed itself to do a work in the world. For the Christ still finds and puts such garments on to walk the earth; the seamless robes of undivided consecration to Himself.

As Desire crossed to Borden Street, and went on up the hill, there came suddenly to her mind recollection of the Sunday noon, years since, when she had walked over that same sidewalk with Kenneth Kincaid; when he had urged her to take up Mission work, and she had answered him with her girlish bluffness, that "she thought he did not approve of brokering business; it was all there, why should they not take it for themselves? Why should she set up to go between?" She thought how she had learned, since, the beautiful links of endless ministry; the prismatic law of mediation,--that there is no tint or shade of spiritual being, no angle at which any soul catches the Divine beam, that does not join and melt into the next above and the next below; that the farther apart in the spectrum of humanity the red of passion and the violet of peace, the more place and need for every subdivided ray, to help translate the whole story of the pure, whole whiteness.

She remembered what she had said another time about "seeing blue, and living red." She was thinking out by the type the mystery of difference,--the broken refractions that God lets his Spirit fall into,--when, looking up as she was about to pass some person, she met the face of Christopher Kirkbright.

He had not been at home of late; he had been busy up at Brickfield Farms.

For nearly four months past, Cone Hill and the Clay Pits had been his by purchase and legal transfer. He had lost no time in making his offer to his brother-in-law. Ten words by the Atlantic cable had done it, and the instructions had come back by the first mail steamer. Repairing and building had been at once begun; an odd, rambling wing, thrown out eastward, slanting off at a wholly unarchitectural angle from the main house, and climbing the terraced rock where it found best space and foothold, already made the quaint structure look more like a great two-story Chinese puzzle than ever, and covered in space for an ample, airy, sunny work-saloon above a range of smaller rooms calculated for individual and home occupancy.

But the details of the plan at Brickfields would make a long story within a story; we may have further glimpses of it, on beyond; we must not leave our friends now standing in the street.

Mr. Kirkbright held out his hand to Desire, as he stopped to speak with her.

"I am going down to Vireo's," he said. "I have come to a place in my work where I want him."

"So have I," said Desire. "But he is not at home. I was going next to Miss Euphrasia."

"And you and I are sent to stop each other. My sister is away, at Milton, for two days."

Desire turned round. "Then I must go home again," she said.

Mr. Kirkbright moved on, down the hill beside her.

"Can I do anything for you?" he inquired.

"Yes," returned Desire, pausing, and looking gravely up at him. "If you could go down to Luclarion Grapp's,--the Neighbors, you know,--and carry some kind of a promise to a poor thing who has just been brought there, and who thinks there is no promise in the world; a woman who tried to kill her